Reasoning isn't about logic (it's about arguing)

Nice link. That could be very useful for me. Thanks.

If you want good textbooks, make sure the author is trying to persuade the students of something, I'd say. I usually am.

Perhaps the process of writing should be separated from the product of writing (i.e. the textbook). The best of both worlds surely is a textbook that doesn't try to persuade at all (since persuasion is tangential to providing an explanation), but which was written with a process involving a lot of arguing (to help stimulate the best reasoning). My brother and I sometimes had heated arguments when we wrote C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, with numerous "red ink revisions" before finally settling on the NPOVish text the reader sees.

I've purchased two of biology-related books by creationist-leaning authors based on this logic. They are still on the stack, so I can't say how the experiment worked out.

Many times I have wandered into IRC with a programming problem, and the very moment I hit enter to send it out and read it on the screen as part of the conversation, the answer occurs to me; the same answer I'd give anybody else in that room asking the question.

Maybe I should rig my IRC client to delay actually sending the first message to a room...

I partake in British Parliamentary Debate. A good argument:

1. Is structured like an essay: tell what are you going to tell, tell it, then tell what you just told.
2. Consists of a description, elaboration, and an example.
3. Elaboration consists of a chain of logic that starts at the position being defended and terminates at a terminal value.

A counterargument either:

1. Attacks the premises or a link in the chain of logic and shows that the argument leads somewhere other then the terminal value.
2. Proves that the terminal value isn't actually terminal.
3. Constructs an alternative argument that leads to an even more important terminal value and does so to make it and the original argument mutually exclusive.

A good counter argument is concise.

For example: this house would force everyone to publish their income on the Internet.

This motion would lessen corruption by crowdsourcing police. Any person could go online and compare their neighbor's apparent wealth to their stated income and raise an alarm should a disparity be found. The neighbor would of course know this and thus would not dare evade taxes or whatever. So we have less corruption, less people in jail due to deterrence, more taxes, and less strain on our actual police!

Attack premises: most people live in big cities in relative anonymity, neighbors don't know each other, and wealth isn't conspicuous.

Attack logic 1: government websites are hardly a popular destination. People simply wouldn't care to go through tables of numbers.

Attack logic 2: people would just spend their ill gotten gains inconspicuously. (counter-counterargument: wealth is about signaling status which must be visible)

Alternative: this is a huge infraction on people's privacy which is more important than lessening corruption. (This one should be more elaborate but I'm out of steam.)

Note though that British Parliamentary Debate is about winning and not truth.

we need a better theory of arguing - what counts as a good argument, a good reply, etc.

What exactly do you mean by good?

Wouldn't that be even worse? If we currently mostly don't use good reasoning for individual truth seeking, but in at least occasionally use good reasoning to argue, wouldn't developing a theory of arguing contribute to displacing that, resulting in even less good reasoning? Or do you think that reasoning would become better for truth seeking if it was freed from the other optimization goal of being good for arguing?

I've been chewing on this question for a while.

This WP article could serve as a starting point - though it looks a little daunting. It makes a lot of a Stephen Toulmin's "six elements of an argument" - I see that Toulmin hasn't been discussed on LW so far. I'll see if I can get some info, summarize and evaluate the usefulness of that framework.

A proposal in line with M&S would be: a good argument is one that causes your interlocutor to accept your conclusion. A good counter-argument is one that justifies your rejecting your interlocutor's conclusion. This conforms to the hypothesis that reason serves argument, and that its twin functions are to help us convince others and to resist being convinced.

I'm also wondering about a "memetic theory of argumentation", where an argument spreads by virtue of convincing others, and mutates to become more convincing. Our "rules" for correct argumentation are themselves but memetic fragments that "ally" with others to increase their force of conviction. For instance, "we should reject ad hominem arguments" is a meta-argument which, if we expect that our interlocutors are likely to use it to reject our conclusions, we will avoid using for fear of making a poor initial argument. In this manner we might expect to see an overall increase in the "fitness" of arguments as a consequence of the underlying arms race.

We should also be careful to distinguish conversation from argument, I see the former as serving an entirely different purpose.

• Learn to enjoy being proven wrong, or you'll never learn anything.

• If you never lose an argument, then you need to find some better arguments.

• Winning an argument is satisfying; losing an argument is productive.

at the same time to avoid over-commenting to get more points?

I see the karma system as benign in this respect, because people love to argue anyway (M&S also mention that in their conclusions). They would do it without a karma outcome, so adding karma seems unlikely to affect the overall number of comments much.

There are punctual exceptions. As the "Spring meta thread" shows (or the pictures thread in the babies and bunnies post), people seem to need opportunities to just goof off. This is fine but it has the unfortunate effect of being a distraction to those who (like me, I'm afraid) prefer the more "serious" stuff.

I downvoted some of the comments in the "This is a comment" thread, but clearly enough other folks disagree with me. Here again M&S have something useful to say: the group isn't always right, and not all group processes track truth; only those which foster production and evaluation of arguments.

So, perhaps what we need is a dual system, with separate votes for "I like/dislike this" one one hand, and "Good/stupid point" on the other hand.

If people started taking your first advice, comment quality would go up, and downvoting might be a little more prevalent, discouraging at least "pointless" posts. Also, posts in clear violation of guidelines would not happen much, unless there was visibly an exceptional benefit, lest they draw downvotes. Judging from MathOverflow (see my other comment), the downvoting doesn't devolve into fearmongering, either, just a healthy immunity to trolling and time-wasting.

This is great Meta material ;)

What is a better system than Karma to encourage status-seeking-rational primates to read the blog, but at the same time to avoid over-commenting to get more points?

Systematically downvoting comments like mine right here.